[Congressional Record Volume 143, Number 118 (Tuesday, September 9, 1997)]
[House]
[Pages H7107-H7112]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                 AMERICAN PATENT PROTECTION BEING LOST

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of 
January 7, 1997, the gentleman from California [Mr. Rohrabacher] is 
recognized for 30 minutes as the designee of the majority leader.
  Mr. ROHRABACHER. Madam Speaker, over the last 3 years, I have been 
involved in organizing support behind the right of the American people 
to maintain the legal level of protection that had been their right as 
American citizens since the founding of our country over 200 years ago.
  In this particular case, what is being diminished is the American 
people's rights to own their own creations. What is being diminished is 
the patent protection that Americans have had since the writing of our 
Constitution.
  Three years ago I did not know anything about this issue. I knew 
absolutely nothing about patent rights. It was brought to my attention 
that in the GATT implementation legislation that was being brought 
before Congress there was a provision that would dramatically change 
patent law in the United States of America.
  I could not believe this was happening, because changes in our patent 
law were not required by the GATT implementation legislation. We had 
been promised by the administration that the only thing that would be 
put into the GATT implementation legislation that went before Congress 
to implement the GATT agreement would be those items that were 
specifically required by the GATT negotiations.
  But when I called the administration repeatedly to find out if there 
would be provisions in the GATT implementation legislation that changed 
our patent law, I was told time and time again that it was none of my 
business and that they were not going to tell me, or they did not know, 
or that that decision may be made and it might not be made; but, most 
of all, it was their decision to make and not mine as a Member of 
Congress, and, thus, I was not going to be privy to the knowledge until 
it was actually presented to Congress.
  This is what they said to the elected Representative of 600,000 
Americans, who represents a high-tech area in California. The people 
who were telling me this were unelected, appointed, officials.
  This should tell you something about the changes that are coming 
about in our country and the changes that are symbolized by that 
provision, which they did eventually sneak into the GATT implementation 
legislation.
  What was put in that bill, which was not required by GATT and which 
we were presented as either you accept everything in this bill or you 
have to vote against the entire World Trade Organization, the entire 
apparatus of world trade throughout the world and leave America on the 
outside, what provision was put in was a change in

[[Page H7108]]

the patent law which stated that Americans have a right to a guaranteed 
patent term.
  This is 3 years later, and most Americans do not understand that from 
the time of the founding of our country until 3 years ago, they had a 
right to a guaranteed patent term of 17 years, and they no longer have 
that right. Their rights have been diminished. It is a very hard law to 
understand if you do not have an invention, so most Americans let it 
drift by.
  What replaced this guaranteed 17-year term, to describe it, was 
traditionally that no matter how long it took you to clear your patent 
application through the bureaucracy, no matter how long it took the 
Government to issue your patent after you applied for it, at the end 
you would still have 17 years of a guaranteed patent term. That was 
replaced by a provision that said that you have 22 years of protection, 
but the clock is ticking against you the minute that you apply for a 
patent.
  So with breakthrough patents and breakthrough technologies that 
guarantee those patents, what we have is a situation where the process 
could take 10 years, and the inventor might be left with, instead of 17 
years, or 22 years, might be left with 12 years. Or, in some cases, 
where it has taken two decades for major pieces of technology to clear 
the Patent Office, the inventor would have nothing to show, much less 
17 years of protection.
  The laser, for example, took many, many, many years, I think perhaps 
over a decade and a half, to receive a patent. The inventor of that 
laser would have been left out.
  Also, the microprocessor. Of course, what happened recently was the 
inventor of the MRI was tied up in court for 20 years with a major 
corporation that was trying basically to steal his right to the 
invention that he invented, the MRI, that has changed the lives of 
people throughout the world, bettered our health care so you do not 
have to have so much cutting surgery. That inventor would have been out 
all of the money, because the major corporation would have tied him up 
long enough for his patent to be worthless in terms of the time that 
was left for him to enjoy the fruits of his creation.
  So that was changed. That raised my antenna, and I began to 
investigate why this happened, and how was it so that Americans were 
seeing their fundamental rights that were guaranteed by law diminished 
in front of their eyes without so much as a whimper from the people 
because they did not see what was happening, and that the elected 
Representatives of the people here in the Congress did not even know 
what they were voting on when they voted on this provision.
  There was no debate, there were no hearings. Instead, it was snuck 
into the GATT implementation legislation.
  What I found out when I investigated was that there had been an 
agreement that was signed between Bruce Lehman, the head of our Patent 
Office, the head of the Patent Office of the United States. When he was 
appointed by President Clinton, he went to Japan, and one of his first 
acts, maybe not one of his first acts, but he went to Japan very 
shortly after being appointed and made an agreement, signed an 
agreement with his Japanese counterpart, to harmonize American patent 
law with Japan's.
  This is an unelected official going to Japan and signing an agreement 
that he, representing the administration, will do what he can to 
harmonize American law to Japanese law.
  This was not a case where America had weak protection and the 
Japanese had strong protection. In fact, the Japanese had one of the 
weakest protections for their inventors of any country in the world and 
America had the strongest protection of any country in the world.
  Our representative, the person hired by the President of the United 
States to watch out for our interests, went to Japan and agreed to 
lower our standards to theirs.
  Now, I would agree that harmonization is a good idea. But if we are 
going to be harmonizing laws with other countries, we should be 
bringing those countries up to our standards, instead of us bringing 
our standards down to theirs.
  Now, in Japan they do not invent very many things. In fact, in Japan 
they are known for copying things and improving some new technologies, 
but just improving them, not inventing new technologies. That is 
because in Japan, the big guys have run rough-shod over the little 
guys, and every time there is a new invention, someone comes up with a 
new idea, if it is a small guy who is out of the clique, he is 
surrounded and beaten into submission by the powers that be, by the 
economic shoguns of Japan.

  They want to change our law, our patent law, so that the American 
inventors, the people of the United States who are inventing things, 
the average person who has this option in order to improve their lives 
by coming up with something that will improve the lives of everyone, 
they want to make those little guys vulnerable to the big guys, just 
like they are in Japan.
  When all is said and done, if we do harmonize our law with Japan, 
what we will have is our little guys will be susceptible to the same 
kind of bullying as the little people, as the regular people in Japan; 
not only bullying by our own huge multinational corporations, but by 
Japanese corporations, and Chinese corporations, and the People's 
Liberation Army, and anybody else who wants to come in here and 
brutalize Americans who are no longer protected with the legal 
protections that they have been afforded since the founding of our 
country, because those protections have been stripped away.
  That is the agreement that was made with the Japanese.
  It has always been part of our law that if someone applies for a 
patent, that, number one, he would have a guaranteed patent term; 
number two, whatever information he has in his patent application, he 
or she, that it is totally confidential.
  In Japan, the system is once you apply for a patent, after 18 months 
that information is made public, so the big guys will know exactly what 
is being created by the small entrepreneurs and the little guys 
throughout the society, and they can take action to steal it.
  But our people have had the right of confidentiality. In fact, 
releasing information from a patent application before the patent is 
actually granted has been a criminal offense.
  In Japan, it is the other way around. They give out all the 
information. In Japan, once the patent is issued, they can attack it 
from all directions. There is reexamination in Japan.
  So what do we have? We have an agreement where this administration, 
with Bruce Lehman, who heads our Patent Office, to change our patent 
law to that of Japan. And that, what I saw in the GATT implementation 
legislation 3 years ago, was only step one in accomplishing this goal.
  We found out what step two was a little bit later, in the last 
session of Congress, in a bill. It was called the Patent Publication 
Act, and they found out, oh, my gosh, that is too explanatory. The 
purpose of the bill is to publish everybody's patent, and nobody wanted 
to do that.
  Everybody understood that if you publish a patent application, you 
are asking for everybody in the world to steal it. So they changed the 
name of that this session of Congress to the 21st Century Patent Reform 
Act and they brought that up.
  But the people of this Congress and the people of the United States 
were not fooled. I brought to the attention of the people of the United 
States in forums like this, and speech after speech after speech, and 
going out to talk radio shows and to the news media and any audience 
that would listen to me, I spread the word, and the American people 
expressed their opinion to their elected Representatives. And even 
though the Fortune 500 companies and this administration and the powers 
that be came down like a sledgehammer on my colleagues, when it came to 
a vote on the floor, we managed to defeat some of the essential 
ingredients of that 21st Century Patent Act.
  We defeated especially the provision that would have required that 
any American who applied for a patent, after 18 months, whether the 
patent had been issued or not, it was going to be published, so that 
every thief in the world would have been able to steal our most 
valuable technology. We managed to get that out of the bill.
  We managed to get out of the bill the provision that would have 
required the

[[Page H7109]]

change of the rules that would have permitted companies to come in and 
attack the patents that were already issued by our Patent Office, the 
reexamination provisions.
  Thus, we were able to take out most of the bad parts of that bill in 
an amendment introduced by my colleague, the gentlewoman from Ohio [Ms. 
Kaptur].
  There were still some pretty bad things in the bill. The bill would 
privatize the Patent Office. It would turn our Patent Office, which has 
never had a scandal, they have never had a scandal in the 200 years it 
has been around, they were going to turn that into a quasi-private, 
quasi-government corporation, like the post office, in which the poor 
patent examiners, who are now shielded from outside influence, would 
have been opened up to all kinds of influences.

                              {time}  2200

  That privatization still stayed in the bill. That type of 
restructuring still was in the legislation that passed Congress. That 
legislation, after it passed here, and as I say, we were 60 percent 
successful, but 40 percent of the bad stuff is still in that bill, it 
went to the Senate.
  But tonight I am here to alert my colleagues and the people of the 
United States who are listening and reading the Congressional Record 
that Senator Orrin Hatch of Utah is continuing his attempts to get this 
bill, in its worst possible form, in the form that would expose all the 
information of our inventions to the enemies of the U.S. and to our 
economic adversaries, and to the big multinational corporations here. 
He is trying to get that bill in its worst form passed through the 
United States Senate. He is trying to attach it to other pieces of 
legislation. The American people have to be aware that if he succeeds, 
it will be coming back to the House of Representatives.
  In fact, tomorrow 60 CEO's will be hitting Capitol Hill of major 
corporations to have their will and to try to talk to Congressmen, 
Members of the House, Members of the Senate. The American people have 
to know that the enemy has not given up.
  Why has the enemy not given up? They have not given up because a long 
time ago they realized that America's greatest asset was what? It was 
the creative genius of our people; the creative genius of the American 
people was our secret weapon in our economic struggle.
  Our adversaries figured it out. They said, how come America is always 
out front? How come they control the economic scene? How come? Our 
people work just as hard as Americans; how come they are the ones who 
are always ahead and control the economy of the world? How come their 
people have such a high standard of living and our people do not?
  The answer is easy. The American people have at their disposal the 
best technology that is available anywhere in the world because 
Americans have been the inventors and the creators and the genius 
behind technological change.
  Our enemies saw that and our enemies set out to change the 
fundamental law that made that a reality, that made it exist, that gave 
us that technological genius, because the American people are not more 
creative, they do not have any more genius than anybody else; after 
all, we come from every culture.
  But what we have had since the founding of our country are the legal 
protections for our technological development that ensured that the 
average person knew that he could use his creative genius to make 
things better and that he or she would benefit from it. Thus, we had 
the major inventors in our country. This is where the Alexander Graham 
Bells and the Samuel Morses and you name it, the Wright Brothers, the 
Thomas Edisons, these are the people who benefited by the legal 
protection, and thus were able to use their genius to keep America a 
step ahead of all the competition and ensure the American people good 
jobs, because their jobs were involved with the best technology. We 
were able to outcompete our adversaries.
  Now they want to change all of that. They tried to change it in the 
most underhanded way that I have ever seen. A piece of legislation came 
through this body. First, they put it into the GATT implementation 
legislation when it was not required by GATT. That in itself was a 
betrayal of the rest of us, when we were told, if you give fast track 
to us, we will only put in the legislation that which is required by 
the treaty.
  Then they tried to sneak the bill through, with very little fanfare, 
just slid right on through the committees, changing the name of the 
bill from the Patent Publication Act, which was too explanatory, after 
all, now we are exposing the fact that we want to publish everybody's 
patent, no, they changed the name to the 21st Century Patent Reform 
Act.
  That is not the way we need to make law, and when we want to change 
law and diminish the protections our law affords the American people, 
we must step up to the plate and discuss it with them, rather than take 
part in this type of underhanded maneuvering.
  The patent law in our country has been unique because we have had a 
higher level of protection from the time of our Constitution. The 
Japanese, when they figured it out, have decided, we have to change 
that. The Chinese, we have to change that.
  We have had an army of lobbyists in this city; millions of dollars 
have been spent to influence Members of the House and now Members of 
the Senate, in order to convince them to change the patent law, and 
changing the patent law to ``harmonize'' our law with other laws, 
harmonize, to bring down the level of protection.
  I want to share with the Members a story about a friend of mine who 
has a new invention. He told me about it this weekend. This friend of 
mine, an average person, has a small company out in California. He came 
up with an idea of how to protect meat, how to protect the consumer of 
meat from consuming bad meat.
  It is an ingenious idea, and I cannot explain it on the floor of the 
House because his patent has not been granted yet. But if his patent 
had been granted and this was on the market, all I can say is the 
American people, every housewife in this country, every restaurant in 
this country, would be confident that the meat they were consuming was 
untainted meat at a very low cost, almost no cost.
  It is a new idea. It is a great idea.
  For 2 years this patent has not been issued, which means that if the 
new laws that Senator Hatch has tried to push through the Senate right 
now, and which some of our colleagues have tried to push through this 
House were in effect, after 18 months his idea would have been exposed 
to everybody in the world, and the Japanese and the Chinese and people 
all over the world would already be copying his idea, putting it into 
production, and his patent has not even been issued. They would be 
using the money they made from his invention to drive him out of 
business. That is what is going to happen across the board in our 
economy if we permit this catastrophe to happen, this abomination of 
American freedom.
  But my friend has confidence we are going to beat it back. He has 
invested his time and effort to try to get this patent. If he succeeds 
and we do not disclose this information, so that he can benefit, we 
will have other such inventions in the future from people like my 
friend that will change our lives, that will save the lives of little 
children who are eating that meat.
  How about my other colleague in California, another friend of mine, 
who came to me when he heard about the fight over patents and he said, 
Dana, I have a new system of killing bugs, bugs, termites and the rest, 
without the use of chemicals. This is a man who is going to save the 
soil at our homes from being poisoned with chemicals. But he says, 
Dana, I am afraid because my patent is still pending, and if they 
disclose this information, it is going to be all over the place before 
I have a chance to capitalize. I cannot raise the money until I have my 
patent in hand, but these other people will get the money and they will 
be in business before I do.

  How long do Members think it is going to be before the inventors of 
this new system to check tainted meat or the new system to make sure 
that we do not have chemicals being spread in our soil to kill the 
bugs, or in our homes to kill bugs, how long will these inventors keep 
coming up with their ideas? They will not come up with their ideas, and 
we will be stuck; we

[[Page H7110]]

will be like the Japanese, run by a group of economic elitists who hold 
the little guy down because the little guy has no economic protections 
and there are no inventions. The standard of living not only of our 
country, but of the entire world, will go down if we lose this battle.
  As I say, Senator Hatch is still trying to get this through in its 
very worst form, through the U.S. Senate. This has been a very tough 
battle, because it has been the battle of the little guy versus the big 
guy. It has been part of an overall effort to change American law.
  First of all, let me explain the last point that I made. Ever since 
the end of the cold war, we have been hearing time and time again 
phrases that are kind of scary. The first phrase we heard was ``the new 
world order.'' That came from a Republican. That came from George Bush.
  I do not know how other people felt about it, but when I heard our 
President talk about a new world order, I said to myself, something is 
wrong here. I am not working for a new world order. I am working for 
the people of the United States who elected me. There is something 
wrong here.
  The new world order? It sounds like we are giving up authority to a 
higher authority than the Constitution of the United States of America. 
The new world order?
  Since that concept went down in flames, along with the presidency of 
George Bush, we have heard time and time again of the global economy, 
the global economy. In it, we have all kinds of powerful interest 
groups pushing to create a global economy. What does that mean, a 
global economy? That means that decisions that were made locally not 
only have been turned over to State government, who then turn it over 
to the Federal Government, but now we are thinking about turning 
decisions that are made by people who have been elected to office in 
the United States over to some unelected bureaucracy somewhere in the 
United Nations or in the World Trade Organization or the world labor 
organization or the world environmental organization, or whatever 
organization it is that has been set up in order to watch out for the 
global environment or the global economy, you name it; and these people 
will be making decisions, and this type of world will be people who 
have never faced the electorate.
  If Americans will blink their eyes, some day they will find that 
their rights have been diminished and that power has been granted to 
some unelected official who may or may not be an American, but who the 
average person here has absolutely no recourse against if a decision is 
made in the wrong way.
  This concept of a global economy, the idea of free trade between 
peoples of the world, is a good idea. The idea of creating a global 
economic system which will be controlled and regulated is a bad idea. 
It is not a good idea, as well, by the way, I might add, for us to be 
trading in a free trade relationship with a mammoth dictatorship like 
China.
  But then again, the world economic trade regulators, once we have 
established this global economic system, may think entirely 
differently. They may think a transfer of wealth from the rich United 
States to the poor countries is a good idea.
  Madam Speaker, this change in the patent law is only one step toward 
harmonization of law. It is a step in the wrong direction. This concept 
of diminishing the rights of Americans in order to create a new world 
order is a threat to the rights, the freedom and the prosperity of each 
and every one of us.
  The patent fight is the first fight, because it has been the first 
one we have been able to identify where actual legal protections 
enjoyed by Americans are being diminished in order to have a 
harmonization of law overseas. That in itself would be wrong. But the 
side effects of giving huge multinational corporations and foreign 
corporations the power over Americans to steal their new ideas, which 
will undermine our economy, not even to mention what it does to the 
lives of these poor inventors who spent their whole lives trying to 
develop something, this shows that it is a bad idea on a number of 
levels.
  As I say, this will be just the first fight. This is just the first 
fight in our battle to maintain the rights and freedoms of the American 
people and the prosperity of our country.


                Announcement by the Speaker pro tempore

  The SPEAKER pro tempore (Ms. Granger). The gentleman from California 
[Mr. Rohrabacher] has been allotted another 30 minutes, and is so 
recognized for that additional time.
  The Chair would also remind Members not to refer critically to 
individual Senators.
  Mr. ROHRABACHER. Madam Speaker, I do not believe that I referred 
critically to any individual Senator. I think I have just outlined the 
positions of Senators. I do not think I used any pejorative 
descriptions of any U.S. Senator. It just happens that this legislation 
that I am describing has someone who is very opposite in opinion, on 
the other side of this particular issue.
  Madam Speaker, let me talk a little bit. Now that I have an extra 
half hour, I would like to discuss a little bit about this whole 
concept that I was ending up with when I thought I just had 30 minutes. 
That is the idea that we are going to be facing more and more 
challenges to our freedom and to our prosperity as Americans from those 
who are trying to foist off on us the necessity of transferring 
authority and power to world organizations and to multinational 
organizations.

                              {time}  2215

  In the area of our national defense, there are those people who, for 
example, are trying to expand NATO. And these are many of my friends. 
Many of my colleagues, Republican colleagues, have been pushing for the 
expansion of NATO. I am sorry to say today that I think that is a bad 
idea. I am sorry to say that, because many of my colleagues I know 
honestly believe that it is a good idea for the United States now to 
stay in NATO.
  It is not time for us to become part of world organizations and put 
our people under U.N. command or NATO command. It is not time for us to 
be involved in multinational approaches. But instead, the United States 
should, no, not be going it alone, but we should instead be trying to 
be as effective as we can be individually, and on a bilateral level, 
with other countries of the world.
  NATO is a good example. NATO's purpose was what? NATO's purpose was 
to prevent the Soviet Union from rolling across Europe at the height of 
the cold war. NATO worked. I am very grateful that our forefathers had 
the courage and the commitment to build an organization like NATO that 
thwarted the aggressive tendencies of the Soviet Union during the cold 
war.
  The cold war is over, and like any other organization that is 
established on a multinational level, the organization does not want to 
disappear once its purpose has ended.
  Instead of spending tens of billions of dollars stationing troops in 
Europe, we should be spending those billions of dollars in developing 
the technologies in the United States, whether it is SDI or whether it 
is building a new aircraft carrier or whether it is building a new 
fighter or whatever type of technology is necessary for the protection 
of the people of the United States. That is what we should be 
developing, rather than wasting tens of billions of dollars in an 
alliance that has already, already served its purpose.
  NATO is meant now, supposedly, we hear, for the stability of Europe. 
Well, when my colleagues visit Europe, they will realize that Europe 
and the European Community have a gross national product higher than 
that of the United States. Let them defend themselves. Let them pay for 
their own stability.
  The United States should play an active part in the role, and I am 
not advocating isolationism in the least. But giving our powers up to 
NATO, or up to the United Nations, is a mistake. We should not be 
giving up our military power, and our ability to make decisions that 
are necessary, up to multinational organizations now that the cold war 
is over.
  That grand alliance was designed to defeat Soviet communism. Soviet 
communism has been defeated. This is nothing more than yet another 
example. There are also calls for us to join another world 
organization. In fact, I will be giving another 1-hour presentation in 
the near future on the global warming treaty, the climate change treaty 
that some people are trying to stampede this Congress into signing.

[[Page H7111]]

  That treaty is based on the idea that mankind is using so much 
energy, that we are altering our environment to the point that the 
world is getting warmer. It is called global warming. Having been the 
chairman of the Subcommittee on Energy and Environment in the Committee 
on Science, and having gone through hearing after hearing on this, I 
can tell my colleagues that I have heard experts on both sides of this 
issue, and I have come to the conclusion that global warming at best is 
unproven and at worst it is a bunch of liberal claptrap.
  Even the most strong advocates of global warming, once you get them 
in a question-and-answer situation, will admit that they are not sure. 
But they are willing, however, to try to push America into policies 
that will drain billions of dollars from our economy, drain billions of 
dollars from our economy, and that money will be gone forever.
  People do not understand the meaning of these tens of billions of 
dollars or hundreds of billions of dollars. That means the amount of 
money that is spent for education. That means the amount of money that 
is spent for true environmental programs. These are things that will be 
defunded in the case of a United States commitment to a treaty that is 
designed to solve a problem that does not exist.
  In one of the most interesting aspects of the global warming treaty 
that I found so far in examining the proposal that we are looking at, 
is that a provision has been added, a strange provision has been added 
to the global warming treaty. What is that provision? Guess what? 
Somebody has added to this global warming treaty, and they are 
discussing, a provision that says we should harmonize all patent law. 
Well, is not that a coincidence?
  Somebody suggested that this is going to be part of a global warming 
treaty, meaning a harmonization of the patent law which I have just 
spoken on and demonstrated the disastrous effects that it will have on 
the economy of the United States of America and the disastrous effects 
it will have on the level of protection that American citizens are 
afforded; protection that they have been afforded since the time of our 
Constitution.
  This is amazing. Well, it really is not so amazing, because the same 
people who are pushing for all of these commitments by the United 
States of America to multinational organizations, and giving away our 
authority from our own elected officials to unelected foreigners, are 
the same ones who are pushing the diminishing of our American patent 
rights.
  Now, who are these people? Well, many of them are Americans, 
interestingly enough, and many of them are Americans who work and 
control huge multinational corporations. I am afraid that people who 
run multinational corporations today, whether they are American 
citizens or not, are not the ones that we can trust to make the 
decisions about our future. Because these individuals may be very 
efficient at running their multinational corporations, but they do not 
seem to care one iota about the American people. They do not seem to 
care one iota whether or not they have succeeded, based on the 
protection of their rights that the American people have given them 
over these last 50 years and, yes, over the 200-year life span of our 
Republic.
  The multinational corporations now have allegiance to the new world 
order or the global economy, not to the American people. And these 
multinational corporations, these huge corporate entities are pushing 
to change the patent law, and pushing to change other laws that I am 
talking about, because they can influence these distant decision-makers 
in the new world that they are creating. But the little guy, the 
American people, will never be able to influence, not at the ballot box 
and not in the marketplace.
  Madam Speaker, these big multinational corporations, many of them in 
our Fortune 500, have made an enormous effort on this patent bill and 
in other things. For example, as we all know, the United States has 
been in an unfair trading relationship with the mainland of China for 
two decades. And the cold war is over. During the cold war there was an 
excuse for us to be in a relationship with Communist China.
  It is the same excuse that we had when we were in a relationship with 
Stalinist Russia during World War II in order to defeat Hitler. That 
excuse is that we needed to make sure that our potential enemies were 
divided and that they were not united against us.
  With the Soviet Union having collapsed, there is no longer an excuse 
for us to put up with an unfair trading relationship like we have with 
the Communist Chinese mainland, the mainland of China.
  Most Americans do not know when they hear our huge corporations 
talking about how important it is for them to be able to sell their 
goods in China that they are not really talking about selling American 
goods in China. What they are talking about is their right as 
multinational corporations to set up factories in China, factories that 
will take our technology and put it at the disposal of the Chinese and 
then will be used to out-compete the United States of America and put 
our own people, our own people out of work.
  Most people do not understand that the things that are produced in 
China enter the United States with a 3 or 4 percent tariff. But when we 
want to export manufactured goods to China, they have a 30 to 40 
percent tariff on our manufactured goods. Who would want to give even a 
democratic country that kind of an edge over the people of the United 
States of America, much less a Communist dictatorship that threatens 
the security of the world and the prosperity of our people?
  But we have continued to give them Most Favored Nation status. Why do 
these multinational corporations who put pressure on all of our 
colleagues to vote for Most Favored Nation status, the same ones who 
are pushing to change the patent law and the same ones who are pushing 
for all of these different global arrangements, why is it that they 
want Most Favored Nation status with China?
  First of all, they have no allegiance with the American people. They 
are going to put them out of work. It is even worse. They want Most 
Favored Nation status so they can receive Government guarantees for 
their investments in China.
  Madam Speaker, the Export-Import Bank, the World Bank, other 
institutions that get our tax dollars from the working people of the 
United States, those tax dollars are being used to guarantee the 
investments of our businessmen in China in factories that will be used 
to put Americans out of work.
  This is the worst kind of hypocrisy. This is the worst blow, the 
worst insult to the American people. Not only are we permitting an 
unfair trade relationship to go on, which is draining billions of 
dollars of worth out of our system and giving it to the Chinese, even 
as they commit genocide in Tibet and genocide against the Muslim people 
in Xinjiang Province, in East Turkestan, and as they butcher their own 
dissidents and repress the Christians. No, we still have to have Most 
Favored Nation status and the tax dollars of the American people are 
being used to guarantee investments against our own people.
  This is a sin against our own people. But it is also a sin that these 
same interests are trying to change American law to diminish the rights 
of the American people and the American people do not even know that 
that is what is going on.
  The American people ought to say, well, if IBM and Kodak and all of 
these big companies are in favor of changing that patent law, it must 
help us in our technological struggle with our adversaries. No, no, 
because those companies are just as interested in taking the ideas of 
our inventors and using them for their benefit without paying 
royalties, as are the big Japanese companies, as are the big Chinese 
companies and all the rest of the economic thieves throughout the 
world.
  It all ties in. It all ties in. But let me tell my colleagues tonight 
that they have forgotten one fundamental aspect that has made this 
world a decent place to live in. They have forgotten the role of the 
United States of America. Our Founding Fathers who wrote into our 
Constitution patent protection, our Founding Fathers who wrote in 
individual freedoms into our Constitution and into our Bill of Rights, 
the people who led our country throughout these years of our 
independence and during the time period as we developed as a Nation. 
These people understood that if there was to be freedom anywhere in the 
world, it would

[[Page H7112]]

depend on a strong United States of America.

                              {time}  2230

  If there is to be decency and honor and integrity anywhere in the 
world, it will be because the United States of America has set the 
standard. It will be because those standards are protected by law in 
the United States of America.
  Without the people of the United States of America and their 
commitment to freedom, there would be no freedom on this planet. The 
Nazis would have won. The Communists would have won, the isms and the 
tyrannical forces that have been at play for this last 100 years would 
have overwhelmed the west. But it has been the strength of purpose 
found in the souls of the people of the United States of America that 
has preserved all of those forces of good and decency on this planet.
  If our business elite, now with their multinational corporations, 
have given up on the American people, because in order to run a plant 
here and maintain our standard of living, they will only make a 5 
percent profit, but if they go to a Communist dictatorship they can 
earn a 15 or 20 percent profit with, of course, the taxpayers 
guaranteeing their investment, pretty soon the American people's 
standard of living will decline and the American people will feel 
justifiably betrayed.
  We cannot let that happen. The battle over the patent is only one of 
the fights that we will be having in the next few years. But we have to 
make sure that the American people maintain their standard of living, 
that decent, high tech jobs are available here, that our wealth is not 
drained from our society to give frivolously to others, that our 
technology is not taken from us to be used against us in competition, 
economically and militarily. Because if we lose the battle here in the 
United States of America and the American people lose faith in those 
principles that our Founding Fathers established 250 years ago, well, 
then the future of freedom on this planet will be short-lived indeed. 
The future of decency and honor, the future of things that have made 
this a planet not dominated by the likes of Mao Tse Tung or some petty 
dictator that now occupies his seat in Beijing, but instead reflect the 
value of our people which created a White House that does not look 
like, I looked in the oval office.
  I used to work in the White House. I remember walking into the oval 
office with my friend 10 years ago and just looking at the oval office. 
And what I saw looked like some sort of a library or some sort of a 
sitting room in somebody's home. I said, does this not look like 
someone's living room here? We both agreed that in every other country 
in the world, the offices of the chief executive looked like a palace 
of power. It looked like a place where boots could be worn or heels 
clicked and salutes given.
  Instead, where the first executive of the United States sat at a 
desk, it looked more like someone's living room, like someplace with a 
family.
  These are the values of decency that come with human freedom. We 
would not put up with some gestapo Communist dictatorship in this 
country because our people believe in freedom. But if the freedom that 
we have permitted our multinational corporations is used to destroy the 
prosperity of our people and if we think that now we have an allegiance 
to free trade so that people can use guarantees by the American 
taxpayers to build up the economy in dictatorships, the American people 
will lose their faith.
  If we are going to win this battle, the American people have to be a 
part of it. One of the reasons we were able to defeat this drastic 
change that they were trying to make in the patent bill, as it went 
through the House, one of the reasons why the Kaptur amendment passed, 
the Kaptur amendment which gave us 60 percent of what we wanted passed 
in a vote, was that the American people called their representatives 
and said, for goodness sake, do not vote for that patent bill, the 
Steal American Technologies Act that Congressman Rohrabacher is talking 
about. Vote to kill it.
  That is what people have to do to the Members of the House and the 
Members of the Senate, because it is still alive in the Senate and that 
means it probably will come back to the House.
  The American people have got to remain alert to this and the other 
threats that we face, because there are some very powerful forces at 
play in this world. There are some very powerful forces at play in this 
city.
  The only thing that turned the tide in this last battle on the floor 
of the House were the thousands upon thousands of phone calls that came 
from all over America to the House of Representatives and said, defeat 
this attempt to give away American technology.
  The American people have every right to be proud of themselves. So 
tonight we stand on the threshold of finishing that fight, because it 
is still going on in the Senate. It may come back here to the House if 
they succeed. Tomorrow, as I said, Capitol Hill will be invaded by some 
of these multinational corporations and some very hifalutin sounding 
people. But small businessmen throughout this country, university 
professors, people who are engaged in research and development of new 
ideas understand how important patent protection is, and they have 
tried their best here, even though we have not had very many resources 
behind us.
  I would just close by asking my colleagues to be alert as the patent 
bill comes back from the Senate and, if there is any influence they can 
exert on the Senators on this piece of legislation, to please talk to 
the Senator from their State to ensure that they know just how dramatic 
the effect of diminishing our patent rights will be and that that 
indeed is the purpose of the legislation that is now being pushed in 
the Senate.

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